Muhammad Iqbal 1877 – 1938

Sir Muhammad Iqbal was an Indian-Pakistani Islamic philosopher, poet, and political thinker of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, widely regarded as the spiritual father of the modern state of Pakistan and as the most influential Muslim poet of the South Asian subcontinent. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, his 1930 Madras Lectures, set out a sweeping renewal of Islamic philosophical theology in conversation with Bergson, Whitehead, and the new physics, in which the human ego, in its dynamic engagement with God and the world, is held to be the proper category through which Islamic philosophy may be renewed. His Persian and Urdu poetry, gathered in The Secrets of the Self and other collections, made the same philosophical project accessible to ordinary Muslim readers.

Muhammad Iqbal was born at Sialkot in the Punjab of British India in November 1877. He read at the Scotch Mission College at Sialkot and at Government College Lahore, where he took his master's in philosophy in 1899, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1905, was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, and took his doctorate at Munich in 1908 with a thesis on the development of metaphysics in Persia. He returned to Lahore as a barrister and a lecturer in philosophy and from the 1920s combined his legal practice with the Punjab Legislative Council and the wider public life of Indian Muslim politics.

His Persian and Urdu poetry includes the Asrar-i Khudi (Secrets of the Self, 1915), Rumuz-i Bekhudi (Mysteries of Selflessness, 1917), Payam-i Mashriq (Message of the East, 1923), Bal-i Jibril (Wing of Gabriel, 1935), and Zarb-i Kalim (Stroke of Moses, 1936); his philosophical prose centres on the seven Madras lectures gathered as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930). His presidential address at the 1930 All-India Muslim League meeting at Allahabad articulated for the first time a vision of a separate Muslim state in north-western India.

Iqbal taught a philosophy of khudi or selfhood: the human ego is the highest finite expression of the divine creative energy, and the spiritual rebirth of Muslim civilisation depends on each believer's attainment of a vigorous, free, ethically responsible self in dialogue with the modern world. He drew on Rumi, Goethe, Bergson, and Nietzsche and is honoured in Pakistan as the spiritual father of the nation. He died at Lahore in April 1938.